Saturday, January 12, 2013

Mummenschanz Revisited

[post 319]

Long before there was Blue Man Group, nouveau cirque, and dozens of genre-bending mask / mime / movement troupes, there was Mummenschanz. To see their show back in the seventies was to be at the birth of entirely new theatrical possibilities. Founded in '72 by Bernie Schürch and Andres Bossard (both Swiss, both Lecoq graduates), and the Italian-American Floriana Frassetto, Mummenschanz was a commercial hit,popular enough to merit a three-year Broadway run.

The commitment to this long New York run led to the training of other actors to work as understudies and to perform in simultaneously touring international companies, giving birth to a sort of Mummenschanz franchise. Now they're back on the road again in a 40th-anniversary show, with a cast of four that includes two of the three founders, Bossard having been lost to AIDS in 1992. I caught them last week at NYU's Skirball Center.

Before Mummenschanz, mask theatre usually meant actors wearing character masks, often drawn from such classical traditions as commedia dell'arte and Balinese dance. Schürch, Bossard, and Frassetto took mask work further into sculpture and the plastic arts, creating full-body, puppet-like creatures — not just humans, but animals and even abstract shapes. Sometimes the fun was trying to locate the performer's actual body; they were flexible enough (at least back then!) to make you puzzle over whether or not they were bending forward or backward.

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"We invested all our intelligence and personality into the visual aspects of Mummenschanz. Mummenschanz is the glases, the pillows, the cylinders, the boulders, the foams, the figures, the soft masks — all these strong images that we were able to impress upon people."—Bernie Schürch

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If you haven't seen their work or need a refresher, here's a short video with a few seconds each from their greatest hits:

"We are craftsmen of imagination... musicians of silence... our aim is to be sculptors of the imagination." — Floriana Frassetto

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Here is what is by far my favorite piece, in which two performers rapidly and deftly reshape their gooey masks into new identities.

I remember loving this piece but also wishing there were more to it, or that the technique could be applied to stronger subject matter. I even fantasized directing a production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros in which the transformation from human to beast was done this way. Well, I never did, but feel free to steal my idea (with fawning full credit).

I certainly was not the only big fan of this piece: elements of it show up in Devil's Ball, an award-winning 1987 music video by the band Double (also Swiss), featuring Herb Alpert on trumpet and showing a strong debt to the imagery of the surrealist painter, René Magritte. Quite the mélange!

My reaction to the current Mummenschanz show was more mixed than I anticipated, my admiration tempered with a yearning for new material and bolder content. Dance companies such as Pilobolus (four decades) and Momix (three decades) also pioneered new movement vocabularies, and continue to tour today, but they are constantly generating fresh material while keeping a few of the classics in the repertory.

For me, too many of these pieces do little more than show off their visual cleverness. If there are two characters on stage, they briefly interact but not much happens and a minute later the piece is over. At its weakest, it reminds me of the less interesting pantomime from that same era, when some thought escaping from a mime box was a deep existential statement. But most didn't, and pantomime was equated with kids entertainment — it was good for them because it stimulated their imagination — but meanwhile became an easy target for derision by wise-cracking adults.

That being said, this show is still a visual feast and inventive as all get out, so of course you should see it if you get the chance, and all credit to Schürch, Bossard, and Frassetto for their ground-breaking work.
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Click here for the Mummenschanz web site.
Click here for their performance calendar.
The 2010 New York Times review is here.
The current New York Times review is here.
A less enthusiastic review from Backstage.
And here for a Jim Moore VaudeVisuals post.

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An Introduction...

[So this is what I wrote six years ago; more or less true!]

Ring around a rosie, a pocket full of posiesAshes, Ashes, we all fall down

Welcome to the All Fall Down blog, an exploration of all aspects of physical comedy, from the historical to the latest work in the field, from the one-man show to the digital composite, from the conceptual to the nuts & bolts how-to. Be prepared for a broad definition of physical comedy (mine!) and a wide variety of approaches. Physical comedy is a visual art form, so there’ll be tons of pictures and videos, but also some substantial writing and research, including scripts and probably even some books.

This blog is a result of me wanting to follow through on lots of unfinished research from the past 25 years. It’s made possible by a full-year sabbatical leave from Bloomfield College that will take me through August 2010. It’s also made more practical by the ease of Web 2.0 tools for managing and distributing content. I had envisioned a web site similar to this blog more than a decade ago, but never got too far with it because it was simply a lot more work. Now, no more excuses!

Just as this blog will be sharing lots of goodies with you free of charge, I hope you will share your knowledge and ideas with me. Feel free to comment on any of it, or to write me directly with your suggestions. Admittedly I don’t see this as a free-for-all forum on the subject of physical comedy. It’s my blog, I’m the filter, and it won’t be all things to all people. That being said, I hope it will bring together insights, information, and people, and encourage others to make their own singular contributions to the field.

I hope to be adding substantial and varied material to the blog on a regular basis, so check back often and be sure to check out previous posts. And finally, a thanks to all of you, past present, and future whose work contributes to our knowledge — and our fun. We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants.

— John TowsenNew York CItyMay, 2009

My Physical Comedy Qualifications

So if you don’t blink, you can see me doing a pratfall on the original 1957 CBS production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella(starring Julie Andrews, directed by Ralph Nelson, stage managed by Joseph Papp).

My Favorite PostsOkay, there are literally thousands of physical comedy blogs out there, but only one physical comedy blogopedia. Why list my favorite posts? Because I want to draw attention to my best research and writing, to posts that make the strongest connections between old and new, between theory and practice, between ha-ha funny and broader global issues. If I die tomorrow, which is impossible because it's already the day after tomorrow in Australia, these are the ones I would like read aloud at my funeral, with high-rez projection of all videos. (Is it bad luck to write that?) Also, please mention that I never voted for a Republican. —jt

Here are some useful and fun blogs and web sites that touch on the whole field of physical comedy, rather than just sites by performers about themselves (not that there's anything wrong with that). Click away!

For the latest posts from these blogs, see below. (Blogs only; not web sites.) These are automatically sequenced by Google in order of most current posts. The blog at the top of the list is the blog with the most recent post. Since the whole idea is to keep you (and me) up to date on current posts in the field, blogs that have not been posting regularly have been dropped from the list; if you've been dropped but are now posting regularly, just let me know.

Here's a list of complete books available for free as pdf documents right here on this here blogopedia, arranged in chronological order; dates are publication in the original language. Clickhere for a Tech Note on these books. Click on the book title to go to that post. More books coming!